Student opens fire at Colorado high school, wounds two classmates

By Keith Coffman

CENTENNIAL, Colo. Fri Dec 13, 2013 7:17pm EST

1 of 14. Arapahoe High School is pictured after a student opened fire in the school in Centennial, Colorado December 13, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Evan Semon

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (Reuters) – A student armed with a shotgun and seeking to confront a teacher opened fire at a Colorado high school on Friday, wounding at least two classmates before apparently taking his own life, law enforcement officials said.

The student entered Arapahoe High School in a Denver suburb around midday brandishing the gun, and asked for the teacher by name before shooting two students, seriously wounding one of them, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said.

The teacher immediately fled the school and was not injured, Robinson said. The gunman’s body was later found in a classroom at the school.

“The shooter is dead as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds,” Robinson said.

The shooting in the Denver suburb of Centennial took place just eight miles from the scene of one of the deadliest school massacres in U.S. history at Columbine High School, where two students gunned down 13 classmates and staff before killing themselves in 1999.

Robinson said there was no sign the shooting was related to the anniversary, due on Saturday, of last year’s shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults before killing himself.

Holly Schaefer, an 18-year-old senior at Arapahoe High School, said she was in mathematics class when she and fellow students heard a loud bang. That was followed shortly by another bang, and “then we knew definitely it was a gunshot.”

Schaefer said her teacher immediately initiated lockdown procedures, shutting the door to the classroom as students huddled in a corner of the room.

After about 30 minutes, Schaefer said, they heard police calling out on the other side of the door. Officers eventually cleared her classroom and as students were being escorted out of the building, she said she saw blood on the hallway floor.

‘SHAKING, CRYING, FREAKING OUT’

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who pushed through tougher gun control legislation this year following Newtown and last year’s attack in a Colorado movie theater, despaired the shooting as an “all-too-familiar sequence, where you have gunshots and parents racing to the school, and unspeakable horror in a place of learning.”

Television images from the high school showed students running out with their hands raised and gathering on a track field. Some students were shown being patted down in the aftermath.

Nearby businesses were also evacuated as dozens of police descended, guns drawn, on the scene. Robinson said officers in Colorado were “slowly and methodically” clearing the school and transporting students by bus to a nearby church to be reunited with their parents.

“We were having fun and laughing, and then all of sudden we heard a really loud bang and my teacher asked what it was, and then we heard two more, and we all just got up and screamed and ran into a sprinkler system room,” student Whitney Riley, 15, told CNN. “It sounded like it was coming from the hall that was near us.”

“We were shaking, we were crying, we were freaking out. I had a girl biting my arm,” she said. “We stayed quiet and we heard a whole bunch of sounds. We heard people yelling, we heard walkie-talkies.”

Robinson said the incident lasted just 14 minutes, and that police fired no rounds. It appeared that the gunman had acted alone, and authorities were not aware of any previous threats to the teacher who had been targeted. The relationship between the student and teacher was not immediately clear.

A device believed by police to be an improvised Molotov cocktail was also found on the grounds and an Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad was on hand to identify it and search for other possible explosives.

He said investigators were speaking with family members of the suspect, whom he declined to identify, and that counselors were working with students and teachers from the high school.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Centennial and Steve Gorman, Alex Dobuzinskis and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Sandra Maler and Gunna Dickson)

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Reuters: Top News

Student opens fire at Colorado high school, wounds two classmates

Student gunman wounds 2 classmates in Colo. school

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — A teenager who may have had a grudge against a teacher opened fire Friday with a shotgun at a suburban Denver high school, wounding two fellow students before killing himself.

Quick-thinking students alerted the targeted teacher, who quickly left the building, and police immediately locked down the scene on the eve of the Newtown massacre anniversary, a somber reminder of how commonplace school violence has become.

One of the wounded students, a girl, was hospitalized in serious condition. The other student suffered minor gunshot-related injuries and was expected to be released from the hospital Friday evening, authorities said.

A third person was being treated for unspecified injuries but had not been shot, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson initially reported that the most seriously hurt student was wounded after confronting the gunman, but he later said that did not appear to be the case.

The gunman made no attempt to hide the weapon when he entered the school from a parking lot and started asking for the teacher by name, Robinson said.

When the teacher learned that he was being targeted, he left “in an effort to try to encourage the shooter to also leave the school,” the sheriff said. “That was a very wise tactical decision.”

Jessica Girard was in math class when she heard three shots.

“Then there was a bunch of yelling, and then I think one of the people who had been shot was yelling in the hallway ‘Make it stop,’” she said.

A suspected Molotov cocktail was also found inside the high school, the sheriff said. The bomb squad was investigating the device.

Within 20 minutes of the first report of a gunman, officers found the suspect’s body inside the school, Robinson said.

Several other Denver-area school districts went into lockdown as reports of the shooting spread. Police as far away as Fort Collins, about a two-hour drive north, stepped up school security.

Arapahoe High students were seen walking toward the school’s running track with their hands in the air, and television footage showed students being patted down. Robinson said deputies wanted to make sure there were no other conspirators. Authorities later concluded that the gunman had acted alone.

Nearby neighborhoods were jammed with cars as parents sought out their children. Some parents stood in long lines at a church. One young girl who was barefoot embraced her parents, and the family began to cry.

The shooting came a day before the anniversary of the Newtown, Conn., attack in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Arapahoe High stands just 8 miles east of Columbine High School in Littleton, where two teenage shooters killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves in 1999. The practice of sending law enforcement directly into an active shooting, as was done Friday, was a tactic that developed in response to the Columbine shooting.

Since Columbine, Colorado has endured other mass shootings, including the killing of 12 people in a movie theater in nearby Aurora in 2012. But it was not until after the Newtown massacre that state lawmakers moved to enact stricter gun-control laws. Two Democratic lawmakers were recalled from office earlier this year for backing the laws, and a third recently resigned to avoid a recall election.

The district attorney prosecuting the theater shooting, George Brauchler, lives near the high school. At a news conference, he urged anyone who needed help to call a counseling service and gave out a phone number.

Tracy Monroe, who had step-siblings who attended Columbine, was standing outside Arapahoe High on Friday looking at her phone, reading text messages from her 15-year-old daughter inside.

Monroe said she got the first text from her daughter, sophomore Jade Stanton, at 12:41 p.m. The text read, “There’s sirens. It’s real. I love you.”

A few minutes later, Jade texted “shots were fired in our school.” Monroe rushed to the school and was relieved when Jade texted that a police officer entered her classroom and she was safe.

Monroe was family friends with a teacher killed in the Columbine shooting, Dave Sanders.

“We didn’t think it could happen in Colorado then, either,” Monroe said.

After hearing three shots, freshman Colton Powers said everyone “ran to the corner of the room and turned off the lights and locked the door and just waited, hoped for the best. A lot of people, I couldn’t see, but they were crying. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

His mother, Shelly Powers, said she first got word of the shooting in the middle of a conference call at work.

“I dropped all my devices, got my keys and got in my car,” she said. “I was crying all the way here.”

More than 2,100 students attend Arapahoe High, where nine out of 10 graduates go on to college, according to the Littleton Public Schools website.

___

Associated Press Writer P. Solomon Banda in Centennial contributed to this report.

Associated Press

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Student gunman wounds 2 classmates in Colo. school